These are the questions that pop up in the mind of every small business owner or growing entrepreneur: “Is it enough to settle with my local marketing or should I go global and reach all round the world?” “Is it risky?” “Is it affordable?” “Can I do it?” “What does it cost to do it?”
The one simple answer for all these questions is – “Yes it is totally possible with Internet or Online Marketing!”
Internet and technology have just shrunk the world into a smaller shell and doing business sitting at one end of the world to the other world is a no big deal. Taking up your small business from the local target audience to an international audience all around the globe will make your brand get recognized. All you have to do is give an online presence for your business and your product will automatically be promoted globally.
There are some good reasons for why to take your business from local to a global platform.
- Yields you more return on investment.
- Protects seasonal local sales by discovering new foreign markets and increasing the sales of your product.
- Reduces your dependence on the existing markets.
- Increases your competition in the global domain and gives you a number of potential customers.
- Increases the sales and profits of your business thereby taking your business to the next level of growth.
Gaining a good amount of knowledge about the facts and advantages of making your business go global with online or internet marketing is important. It will make your brain and eyes open to new ideas, marketing strategies approach, and attract customers for your product from all over the world.
The Internet has made possible for any business owner to open up their business market in any other part of the world. It has taken news, culture, and business from different countries to be brought under a single cover, that is, web. This has tempted many small company owners to open up their business internationally.
Taking a small business into the global arena is not much of a complex process. But you gotta do a certain amount of research and get a good level of understanding about the current local market trends, target markets, competition and the requirements for your business to be successfully launched globally towards growth.
Here are seven great ways to take your business from local to global with online marketing.
1.Translate Your Website To Other Languages
The first and foremost way to take your local business into the global platform is to start from your website. Because your website is the virtual shop front that people walk in to know about you and purchase your products. So, if you want people from other countries to visit your page, make it compatible with them. That’s it!
You should translate your website to other languages which are the first step of successfully marketing to your international audience. For this, you need to have a clear idea of your own and other’s cultures. Cultures, habits and online etiquettes differ from country to country and so being aware of such things will be helpful for you in building a cross-cultural compatible website.
Translate and adapt your website to different countries after reading and knowing a lot about other cultures too. Your international audience too should like your website and get attracted to look into it, isn’t it?
There are many companies who have adopted this technique and seen success. Only when you translate your website to other languages, you will
- Get increased profits and income
- Render good customer service
- Build up brand trust and credibility
- Get more traffic to your website
- Overcome your competitors
- Go into new markets
2.Customize And Implement International Search Engine Marketing
You should first know what International Search Engine Marketing is. It’s a combinational process of selecting the right search engines, customizing or localizing content and understanding keywords. Now let’s get a clearer view of how this works.
- Pick the right search engines by doing a little research on which search engines are used by your target market audience. Maybe in US, you can easily get your target demographics’ notice by advertising in the top three search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. But brother this may not be the same for other countries. It varies with different geographical locations. Mostly for certain region-specific local markets, local search engines of regional languages are used.
- Customize your content according to your international viewers. Just translating your website to another language isn’t sufficient enough. Content matters a lot. Only when you provide quality attractive content, the international audience would be interested in you. So, localize your content of the products and services suitable to the market you target.
- Choose local keywords that would be right enough to catch your target audience. In International Search Engine Marketing, you cannot go with translating your keywords into other languages. But a good idea would be to use keywords by getting along with native speakers of that country and put it up in your website and content. Always keep in mind that keywords are just their own thoughts of internet users that are used by them to search on the internet, and so it’s wise to go with their local language usage.
3.Optimize Your Website Design To Suit Global Visitors
The first point of communication with your customers is your website. So, you have to optimize your website design to be completely appealing and flexible enough to navigate for international visitors.
These are the tips to develop your global-friendly website.
- If you own an e-store and offer international shipping, then it’s important to provide currency conversion option to the customers for their purchasing amount. With the help of some currency conversion API tools available in the market, you can have this option which will be helpful for your international customers.
- Minimize the use of text along with graphics in your website because it cannot be translated. Also, make sure that your site design allows machine translation. Finally, test your site with a machine translation service and make necessary changes, as some elements may not display correctly.
- Usage of colours and symbols must be checked while designing your site. Perceptions of colours vary widely with different cultures and countries across the world. For example, white is considered as pure in some countries whereas as a symbol of mourning in other countries. So, check out before using colours, logos or graphics while designing your website globally.
- Check up your site’s loading speed with Yahoo Developer Network. This monitoring is important when you’re going to serve the global audience. So it’s good to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which is a collection of web servers around the globe. This improves the loading time with the aid of the server closest to your site visitor.
4.Make Your Social Media Accounts Flexible To Multiple Languages
Taking your business into the global market via Social media marketing is pretty easy and worthy too. If your site has started getting more number of visitors and your business is slowly getting the attention of the international audience, then it’s the right moment to make your social media accounts adaptable to various languages.
- In Facebook, you can use two techniques – by creating a single page or many. While following the first method, you can target updates by selecting language, location, and demographics. With this, your targeted users can continue seeing your posts in their newsfeed. While following the second method, it increases the localization of each page, but you gotta spend some really good time creating all pages with distinct logos and text.
Selecting Language preferences in Facebook
- In Twitter, you can adapt language flexibility by creating multiple Twitter accounts, one for each language, so that you can tweet in multiple languages and reach different demographics.
- In YouTube, the best idea is to create subtitles in different languages for the same video and upload it and promote globally.
5.Expand The Blog Posts Of Your Website Blog
Blogging which is related to content marketing is the next step you can take towards driving your global audience. Blogs speak for themselves and when you offer such quality content which is not sales-oriented, rather an informative one, you’ll get more visits to your blog content from international users.
You can quickly establish a firm footprint in the World Wide Web (www) platform by providing good blog posts and promoting it socially. This will automatically have a positive impact on your SEO by increasing your visibility while searching via search engines.
You expand your blog posts and get easy traffic to your site through Google or Yahoo or Bing. Another tip is to include calls-to-action in your blog post to generate more leads.
6.Increase Your Usage Of E-Mail Marketing And E-Mail Remainders
You’d have already implemented e-mail marketing for running your business locally. But now you’re going global and so increase its usage.
How?
- You have a bigger audience and so do more e-mail marketing campaigns targeting different audiences.
- Increase the number of your subscribers’ lists according to different countries or targeted regions.
- Send the number of e-mail reminders about your time-limited deals or offers.
- Implement e-mail segmentation technique and send emails to the audience specific to location and languages with relevant seasonal deals for them.
Do all these and you yourself will see the change in your global business growth.
7.Try Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising / Google Adwords
Small business owners who’re trying to market their business to different locations can make use of PPC ads. PPC ads are the best tools for getting into the online marketing world with the little amount of dollars that you have in hand and reach them to your targeted regions.
Also, a well-organized Google Adwords campaign by executing it in the right way can render more leads for your business. Here, the key of success lies in how efficiently you select your keywords that should be search-oriented and commonly used by your target audience. You can activate some conversion tracking techniques to know how successful you have been in reaching your target.